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HH: Where did you move to?

NH: From there, we went to... well prior to the evacuation, I had the opportunity to go to high school in Watsonville. And that's the first opportunity I had to ride in a school bus, I never did that before in my life. Anyway, right after that, we got orders to move out, and we went to Salinas rodeo grounds. And I think we stayed there from about April to July, I'm not too sure about that timeframe. And then from July, I think it was July. In fact, it might be July 4th that we moved into Poston, Arizona, and you were loaded on train, coach train with lines drawn down, I remember that. You weren't allowed to see where you were going, and it took a little over, maybe one or two days, and the temperature got very hot as we went. And when we arrived in Poston I think the temperature must have been over a hundred degrees at that time. And I could remember old people who were getting heat prostration, and, in fact, some had even, had died due to some change in temperature.

HH: Do you remember anything else about those camps in Poston?

NH: Oh, yes. The first thing that really struck me was that very hot and dry place. And then when we were in these barracks, I couldn't believe that we could see the ground between the boards on the floor. And another incident that happened was when there was a windstorm. The dust would come right up between these cracks, I could remember that. So to reduce that or eliminate that, we had to really stuff with newspaper, wet newspaper, and we stuffed it, caulked it up, and that helped a lot. But another thing is these barracks were, the outside covering was tarpaper, and they're black, and so it really got hot inside. And there was no way that we could stay in there very long during the day, so you had to be outside. And I could remember one time my dad rigged up a burlap curtain in front of the doorway when the wind blows, and he had water dripping, and he soaked the burlap. And so we had an artificial type of air conditioning there. But that wasn't too cooling, but we did anything we could do to try to stay cool.

HH: How long did you stay there?

NH: Let's see. July... probably about a year. Went through 'til about, yeah, about ten to eleven months.

HH: Then what did you do?

NH: Well, first thing was all young people were involved with starting or continue their education. So they had a makeup school system set up there where the teachers were, at the beginning, were people like a pharmacist would be the chemistry teacher, engineers would be, maybe math and science teachers, anybody that was in the office became secretarial teachers. So that's the way we started the school, in these empty barracks that were available. And later on, I remember during the summertime we built the bricks for the school, it was adobe type of construction. And we all helped him making these adobe, because it was easy to make these adobe due to the hot weather we had there. And you get a mixture with mud and straw and you put it in the frame and you lay it out there in the sun, and it's pretty thick. It's almost two-by-two by maybe six inches thick. And we made hundreds of those, and they used those to make the walls. And then one day we had a full day of moving equipment from these barrack classroom into the new ones. But I didn't stay there very long to enjoy that school building because by then, I had an opportunity to come out to the east to get a formal education in the Philadelphia area.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.